Archive for June, 2017

This is a parody of Jonathan Coulton’s ‘Glasses’ from the album ‘Artificial Heart’. I started writing it some time ago and decided it was about time I finished it. Feel free to sing it if that’s a thing you can do!

Check the bedside stand
Check my own right hand
Check I’m not going blind to what’s hiding in plain sight

Shake the blankets out
Find some old self-doubt
Never finding the the clarity abandoned late last night

I had them then, don’t know where they are
I’ll check again, mountains and morasses
Without a lens, can’t see near or far
I can’t see
I can’t find my glasses.

Check atop my head,
The small-print book I read,
Check the corner where they never are and never ought to be.

I’m careful where I step
Watch the floor except
It’s all a blur, a crude moving blotch of who knows what to me

I had them then, don’t know where they are
I’ll check again, mountains and morasses
Without a lens, can’t see near or far
I can’t see…

Not their usual place
Not here on my face
I know they’re bound to be somewhere I’ve already looked three times.

Find my old car keys
The old futilities
A cat’s fresh leavings, a Lego brick, a quarter and three dimes.

I had them then, don’t know where they are
I’ll check again, mountains and morasses
Without a lens, can’t see near or far
I had them then, don’t know where they are
I’ll check again, mountains and morasses
Without a lens, can’t see near or far
I can’t see
I can’t find my glasses.

Like this:

The other day I was reading some developer documentation about nodes while I had Jonathan Coulton’s ‘Sunshine’ from the album ‘Solid State’ in my head. ‘The road we’re on’ became ‘the node we’re on’ and the next thing I know I’m writing a parody about the runtime, and errors that could have been detected by the compiler in other languages or with stricter compiler settings but instead aren’t detected until runtime. I didn’t end up using the ‘node’ line. The first verse barely needed changing, so for fun I tried to keep as many words from the original as I could in the rest of the parody as well. Whether that’s a good thing depends on your taste and how well you know the original. Feel free to sing it if that’s a thing you can do!

We were blind to every sign
That we should have seen
In a clearly broken line
Machine to machine
Our mistakes were the future
But no one could tell

Lots of errors to detect
The tests didn’t show
The things compilers could have checked
We just let it go
Walked away as assumptions
Crumbled and fell

We bust our arse
To find the errors the machine could parse
Catch it just-in-time
Here in the runtime

Cast the pointer to a type it’s not (runtime)
Walk the edge case of the code we’ve got (runtime)

Every bit was filed away
There’s memory to fill
There’s no message that could say
Receiver is nil
We don’t heed any warnings
Try it and bail

Cast from Any type to this
The object’s a tease
Reflect to find out what it is
A sudden unease
If the data’s corrupt
Then when did it fail?

We soldier on (just a flesh wound)
Heap space and registers are almost gone (memory use ballooned)
Watch the stack unwind (maybe we’re doomed)
Here in the runtime

Cast the pointer to a type it’s not (runtime)
Walk the edge case of the code we’ve got (runtime)

The caller of the method must not do this
Everything’s your fault, you have been remiss
Code is fine, the world has something amiss

All the tests have slipped away
Just garbage I/O
I won’t last another day
And neither will O
EOF of a stateless mutable thing

The data’s blitzed (blame the new hire)
There’s nothing left that can remember it (cut the red wire)
But this is fine (halt and catch fire)
Here in the runtime

Cast the pointer to a type it’s not (runtime)
Walk the edge case of the code we’ve got (runtime)

Cast the pointer to a type it’s not (runtime)
Walk the edge case of the code we’ve got (runtime)

∎

I’m not so sure about ‘EOF of a stateless mutable thing’ and whether it would be better stateful or immutable. It doesn’t exactly make sense (does anything, when it’s that far gone?) but it sounds cool, and a lot like the original. I’ll release it like this and patch it in production if necessary. 😉

I’ve been performing at a lot of open mics in Vienna and wherever else I happen to be, so I wrote a poem about why I do it. Here’s a video of my performance of it at the open mic on JoCo Cruise 2017, with some special pandering to The Doubleclicks, who hosted the open mic, and some accidental offense to BatSteve, who was right in front of me, probably taking photos.

If there’s one thing that’s lauded in the internet age,
it’s if I want to be applauded I don’t need to go on stage.
I could write shit in my bedroom, gathering tweets and shares and likes,
but despite it I still head to gatherings known as open mics.

Because fuck it, our creations need a community
and luck is preparation meeting opportunity,
so when The Doubleclicks or Weird Al Yankovic come to town
and every good opening act mysteriously comes down
with a synthetic disease to which I have immunity,
I’ll be ready to please, dropping rhymes with impunity.

‘Cause I’m a Master of Rhyme;
I’ve got a Masters degree
and my thesis was a rhyming dictionary,
so I’ll be rapping my rants
and you’ll be clapping your hands
and flapping your panties
that you happily planned
to throw at fabulous bands
and I’ll be nabbing their fans
while they are crapping their pants

In real life I’m a hacker and I’m super science knowledge-y:
linguistics and mathematics and some microbiology
but I admit that in the latter I have lax methodology,
and for that I say no matter; I present my apology:
if your bladder had a splatter, don’t be mad; I tried urology.

So back to the point — my plan is all about practice.
The knack to seem much better than any surviving opening act is.
And that may sound unfettered and conniving but the fact is
they lack my well-honed stagecraft and immunoglobulin factors.

Because I’m
perfecting my art
and projecting my heart
While collecting the hard-earned
affection that’s marred
by those correctly called “artists”
rejecting my protective injection,
electing collective infection — ejecting a shart.
And maybe I’m a chump who’s not much better than you,
but I’ll be number one while you’re going number two.

I digress; I’m an open mic nerd; I require us
to weary of hearing Free Bird, Miley Cyrus.
When merely a chord or a word can rewire us
and everyone’s here to be heard and inspire us
then I’ll engineer a deferred norovirus.

So now you understand why I’m facing my fears.
I’m bracing to be panned while embracing my peers
so I’ve no stage fright when the big stars are here.
There’ll be no cage fight, the choice will be clear,
because I write each night I can guarantee ya
that my shite’s not trite, or second tier,
and the light’s so bright I can barely see ya,
and I’ll be the only artist without diarrhoea.

∎

Everything in my poem is true, except for the microbiology stuff. I really did make a rhyming dictionary for my Masters thesis. It’s already better than any other rhyming dictionary I’ve used, but I’m working on more improvements to it before promoting it more widely.

Ironically, and unrelated to any norovirus experiments I deny doing, I actually had a short bout of diarrhoea a week ago, and am now nursing an injured foot because I fainted and woke up on the toilet floor. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll know I’m no stranger to waking up injured on the toilet floor — I wrote a poem called A Skirmish [With My Least-Favourite Body Part] about the previous time that happened. And now, coincidentally, you can buy a pdf of a poster of that poem! It has the poem looking like it’s written in blood, and a schematic of the offending body part in the background. I originally made the poster a while ago as a goodbye present for a friend who likes that poem, but since it was better value to print more than one, I put one up on the wall of my toilet, and sold/swapped a few to other people, who seemed to really like it.

I decided it would be cool to put it up as a pay-what-you-like download for Menstrual Hygiene Day on May 28, but after overshooting that deadline researching sites where you can do that sort of thing, I instead ended up opening an Etsy store. There you can download the poster as two pdfs, one optimised for A4 and one for US Letter format, and print however many copies you like, just as long as you don’t make money from them or remove the credits (it’s BY-NC-SA). It’s not pay-as-you-like, because Etsy doesn’t do that sort of thing, but I think the price is fair — cheaper than many simpler downloadable posters on Etsy. It’s all vector-based so should print nicely in larger sizes as well. I’d love to see this on toilet walls all over the place.

If people are interested I’ll also add an option to buy printouts of it; the printouts themselves would be cheaper than the download but would probably work out more expensive with postage, and you’d only have however many you bought without the option of printing more.

I’ve been meaning to offer a way to buy They Might Be Giants posters directly from me, so I also added those to the store. The postage from Austria is really high for most parts of the world, so if you’re in, say, the USA, you’re probably better off getting a poster from Zazzle, but if you’re in Europe, you’ll get a better quality poster (I don’t recall the exact paper specifications but I think the ones I have are on 300gsm paper. It’s really nice) at a lower price from me through Etsy. I also make more profit that way. Most of the money you give Zazzle goes to Zazzle, while most of the money you pay via Etsy goes to me.

While you’re buying menstruation- and science-related poetry, check out my friend Chella’s Etsy shop, where you can get some zines about menstruation and space, one of which (not the space one) has a lot of cool menstrual poetry in it. Also, even more importantly, sign her petition to keep branding out of menstruation education. Or at least read it and do what you can to improve menstruation education in your part of the world; Chella put a lot of work into the petition and it’s quite interesting.